


L E F T  H A N D  M A N

by Heroesincolor



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 13:24:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9273719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Heroesincolor/pseuds/Heroesincolor
Summary: A one-shot based directly off the Pacific Rim movie, this shows the difficulties two people with a past they want to keep hidden have in drifting, and the final result of what it is like to share the mind of someone you thought you had figured out.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Preface: Before the invasion of the Kaijus, Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers were childhood friends, who eventually joined the military together with Steve as a captain and Bucky as his trusted sniper. Once they had retired, the apocalypse began and the two were recruited to pilot a jaeger, which they did years before Steve was killed in the line of duty, and Bucky retreated from the world, finding handyman jobs in cities while keeping on the move. When Nicky Fury, the head of the Kaiju program recruits him once again, Bucky is brought into a base where he is told to choose a partner and after given several options, he chooses Natasha Romanoff, who kicks his ass in a sparring match. More commonly known as the Black Widow, Natasha is a Russian woman who comes from a past the entire base is clueless to. She lets her curiosity drive her to agree to a Drift with Bucky, and she learns she has more in common with the soldier than she would have once thought.

[ N A T A S H A ]  
Once the neon, vibrant lights of the jaeger flashed a one, zero, zero, and percent sign before my eyes, the silence between James and I yielded to the precarious walls of a dam shattering — and memories rushed in, more violent than the roar of the ocean the damned beats came from. 

I knew he had once been part of the army, and I expected flashes of war, bullets cracking bones and shattering skulls, a symphony of death that soldiers wail in the night to drown out. But what filled his mind was a blonde man, no more than a few inches taller him with blue eyes and a humble smile I think I could have come to admire. 

And in the rush it had begun, the memories trickled like the water from a faucet, drips allowing me to see only flashes of the friendships — no, the brotherly love shared between the two.

"James," I spoke quietly, enough for him to hear but not for the communications to pick up on, "Let me in. " 

My eyes flickered to him, memorizing the pained expression, recognizing it as a replica of the expression I have seen taunting me in the reflective glass of the pilot helmets. He was ensuring I didn't see anything he didn't want me to, and the beginning of the Drift must have taken him by surprise — the power of another person tugging your memories and enticing you to share them when you have been all too willing to give them up to your partner before. 

I wasn't the blonde man in his memories, and he may not Drift as easily with me as he did him, but I didn't want out drift to be his exhausted mind giving up its rebellion and allowing me on. 

James didn't have the practice I had in building a wall around memories until even I could pretend they didn't exist — and he was a good man, a broken man, but a good man. 

Glancing up towards Stark and his technicians, I shook my head as he made a gesture to cut the connection, closing my own eyes. And this time, instead of feeling the rush of  
memories, I felt them drain from me, flooding out and swallowing James's mind.

[ B U C K Y]  
The drift was a shithole. I had forgotten what it felt like to have someone pulling on your mind and gaining access to your memories. Natasha saw glimpses of Steve, despite her acting making it seem as though the barrier had kept them away. The moment they left was the moment that feel like I had lost a little more of Steve. I wasn't going to keep her shut out, I had requested her as my partner, but I wouldn't flood her with my mess.

When I said it like that, it sounded almost selfless, but it was the selfish desire I had to hold on to my memories keeping me from opening up to her. 

And hell be damned the moment I felt a sudden rush — they nicknamed her Black Widow for a reason. Widow for the intricate web of protection she had spun around her memories and Black for the mystery of her past and the training she had received. I hadn't expected to ever catch a glimpse of her memories — much less the first memory to be the melodic tune of a piano as a little girl, no more the ten years old, twirled around the room with the grace of — with the grace of Natasha. The only woman I knew who could be fluid yet so damn aggressive in even the smallest tilt of her chin. 

The younger Natasha began to speed up as the song escalated to a crescendo when suddenly, the room fell black. 

Mirrors of a dance room were replaced with thick black walls, the dance floor with skimpy training mats littered across the wooden floor, and the piano with a women who surveyed a little less than thirty girls with the look of a hunter. Somehow I made out she was picking out the fittest of the bunch. The memory carried me to an older Natasha, sixteen at the maximum, standing before a blonde girl with bared teeth and a look soldiers donned when they were ready to kill. 

"один два три. идти!"  
One, two, three. Go!

The girls wasted no time, and the blonde leapt towards Natasha who spun beneath her arm, and in a speed no army man or woman could match, took the girl's hand, twirled behind her, and brought her arm jerking upwards, a crack of what had to be at least six different bones and loud cry signaling that she had won. 

Before I could marvel in the sheer strength and skill it would take to so easily break a woman's arm, the memories flashed to Natasha standing before a man, a simple .9 millimeter gun resting in her palm. 

She was older now, perhaps a year or two from her current age, but her body lacked the grace of her younger and older self.

Almost as though another mind had attempted to control her body but couldn't understand the mechanics of her fluid movements and flawless precision. 

"Kill him Natalia."

Natalia.

I repeated it to myself, as it took a shape to the image my mind had taken of her — fitting in the crevices of her mysteries and just sounding right. 

My focus turned back to the memory, watching as without any hesitation, Natalia fired the gun, and she turned, staring directly into me. 

Her eyes weren't green.

Glossed over and resembling a swamp more than a forest untouched by man, they shone dully in the hospital like light.

I wasn't an expert in mind control.

Hell, I wasn't even sure any of that voodoo was real, but the woman who killed that man hadn't been Natalia, something about it seemed off, and almost, as though a switch had clicked, the memories began to slowly recede. 

From her look of determination, I guessed she had little more to show me, that she had given me a glance into the parts of her life that were once shrouded by black and hidden beneath webs no one dared to tread near. 

[ N A T A S H A ]

I have never experienced such peace during a drift as I did with James. When the Red Room paired us with other girls, we had no bonds of friendship, and although we understood one another, we began as competitors from the age of eight and would end as competitors until only the strongest survived. Yelena and I were the greatest products of the experiment the Red Rood was, the two strongest, fastest, smartest, but in the end, she knew I had always been the greater of us, and she worked against me more than with me.

But with James — with James I felt a sense of compassion and admiration. No pity, no judgement, and no fear.  
In curiosity, my gaze flickered towards him, wondering what memories he had seen, only to find him staring directly back, his eyes narrowing as they met mine.

"Green." He nodded, and his fingers twitched, as though he wanted to reach out but refrained, instead looking towards the ground at my feet. 

"I am not a good man, Natalia."

Flinching at the name I have not heard since my time in the Red Room, my eyebrows knit together, knowing I would have to grow used to a man knowing my past nearly as well as I do.

With Clint, it seemed unimaginable — he was too good. Too kind hearted. Too morally just. 

James carried ghosts in his closet, skeletons lurked around the edges of his memories, taunting him as much as mine did and although I held no doubt he was a better man than I could ever be, I needed to know that I was not the only one with a shadow of a past.

"And I am not a good woman. But two bads make a right no?"

For the first time since our spar, a smile ghosted at the corners of his lips, and he nodded, no further words needing to be exchanged. 

Rather than the flood of memories from before, they streamed into my subconscious — names, numbers of dog tags, makeshift graves built in the deserts of Afghanistan. 

The blonde man appeared once again, in the scope of James's sniper, keeping a season eye on the ruins of a battleground beneath the man.

"Buck, this isn't Ispy, the ground is empty."

"Was the ground empty on the Long Island ferry when you tripped over your own feet and embarrassed yourself in front of— what was her name again Steve?"

Steve.

The name held no familiarity yet I felt as though it had been branded on my skin. 

Slowly, the memory faded, the next filled with the whirring of a jaeger and the battle cries of the Kaiju. 

"Steve!"

A strangled cry drew my attention towards Bucky, who had lost the left arm of his suit, his eyes glued to a dark figure tearing through the left shoulder of the bot. Quickly turning in the direction, a Kaiju's mouth tore through the metal and ripped Steve from his stand.

I expected it to burn — to be some form of pain only torture could match.

But it was defeat, decades spent of friendship fighting bullies in alleyways of run down movie theaters, standing side by side while bombs burst and bullets rained down from enemy lines, the very first Drift — all of it drained of emotion and pride until they were little more than flashes of a movie James couldn't connect to. 

I didn't feel a sympathy for him nor did I pity him, but rather understood him. Living years where the memories you collected, the experiences you collected had no effect on your life had been something I suffered with for twenty-four years.

I was no one but the sculpture the Red Room had delicately crafted.

James had been a soldier, a hero, a friend, a brother, and in the single instant of losing the left arm of his jaeger, he thought he had become the shell of the man he once was.

Yet he remained one of the best men I have ever known, and I may not have been the greatest judge of character, I may not have had the moral compass to determine the north and south of being a good person, but to have suffered and lost and to have kept moving was more than a simple survival instinct within him.

I felt it.

This time, when my eyes met his, he held a look of determination, nothing like the man I had seen before had, but it was the look of a man ready to fight for something.

“You ready get these sons of bitches?”

I shook my head in amusement, “You Americans are like hound dogs with war.”

Swinging my left arm out, the jaeger whirred to life, complying with my movements.

The Drift was successful.


End file.
